by Salar Abdoh
Javad Afhami, born in 1965, volunteered for the Iran-Iraq War at age fifteen. Years later, he wrote the award-winning book Cold Sooran based on his experiences. His other works include the highly acclaimed short story collections The Tale of the Samand Taxicab and The Livid Umbrella. His novels Rendezvous in the Forest of Acorns and The Year of the Wolf are forthcoming.
Aida Moradi Ahani was born in 1983 in Tehran. After graduating from college, she began writing articles and essays on literature and cinema. One of her short stories from her first collection, Pins on a Cat’s Tail, has been adapted to film, and her widely acclaimed novel about the Iranian financial mafia, Golfing on Gunpowder, was published in 2013.
Azardokht Bahrami was born in 1967. She is a writer of short stories, novels, plays, film scripts, and humor. Her book Wednesday Evenings won several of the top literary prizes in Iran. She has published four books, with two more novels and two short story collections forthcoming.
Lily Farhadpour is a writer and journalist. Her books include the story collection The Window with a Blue Glass Opening to the Back Alley and the novels Striped Saturday and Leaden Seconds and Metro Line 4. She has also been senior editor at a number of Iran’s most important journals and newspapers.
Farhaad Heidari Gooran, an Iranian of Kurdish descent, was born in 1972. He is a prominent writer and editor at several newspapers and journals in Tehran and also the author of three novels, The Colors and Legends of Reincarnation, The Decadene Reader, and Shortness of Breath, which won the influential Mehregan literary prize in Iran in 2008.
Danial Haghighi was born in 1988. With a degree in architecture and city planning, he considers himself something of a left-leaning underground researcher in Tehran whose first book, Declaring a Vegetable State, was—like countless others in Iran—banned from publication by the censorship department of the Ministry of Culture; it has since been published in London.
Yourik Karim-Masihi is an Armenian-Iranian Christian born in 1963. He is an award-winning graphic artist and writer. His books include three collections of short stories: Ground Floor; Dream, Memory, Happiness and Others; and The Long Highway. He has also published a collection of four one-act plays and has written a two-volume collection of essays, Night Becomes Dawn, now in its third printing, about photography and cinema.
Vali Khalili was born in 1984 in south Tehran, and has worked as a journalist since the age of eighteen for some of Iran’s most important newspapers, including Shargh and Etemaad. Currently he is a crime reporter whose coverage ranges from rape and murder to public executions and earthquakes. He has also worked with the BBC in Turkey and Portugal, and is the recipient of two awards of excellence for his reportage.
Mahsa Mohebali was born in 1972. Her publications include The Voices, The Grey Spell, Lovemaking in Footnotes, and Don’t You Worry. She has won numerous awards for her fiction, including multiple prizes from the Golshiri Foundation. In 2013 she was awarded a residency at the international program of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.
Gina B. Nahai is a best-selling author, columnist, and full-time lecturer at USC’s Master of Professional Writing Program. Her novels have been translated into eighteen languages, and have been selected as “Best Books of the Year” by the Los Angeles Times and the Chicago Tribune. She has also been a finalist for the Orange Prize, the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, and the Harold U. Ribalow Prize. Her latest novel, The Luminous Heart of Jonah S., is published by Akashic Books.
Majed Neisi is an Arab Iranian who was born in southern Iran during a bombardment in the Iran-Iraq War. Since then he has dedicated himself to examining the pathology of war in battlegrounds across Iraq, Lebanon, and Afghanistan. His dozen documentary films, including reports on combat and the international drug trade, examine ordinary people caught up in extraordinary circumstances, and have been screened in festivals in France, the US, Sweden, Holland, and South Africa.
Sima Saeedi was born in 1969 in Birjand, Iran. Imprisoned during the first years of the Islamic Revolution, she restarted high school in 1985. During President Khatami’s reform period she worked as a journalist and also served as the chief editor of the online magazine Tehran Avenue. Her love for Tehran is inexhaustible and currently she runs a café in the nearby countryside.
Mahak Taheri was born in Ahvaz, Iran, in 1973. For the last fifteen years she has worked in the field of architecture while publishing short stories in various journals and magazines in Iran. Her novel Name & Surname is forthcoming.
BONUS MATERIAL
Excerpt from Tehran at Twilight by Salar Abdoh
Now available from Akashic Books
MALEK
He’d spent the weekend at a think tank near Dupont Circle in DC with an array of retired American military types and political science professors in and out of government service. Now, on the 1:05 a.m. train back to New York City, Reza Malek, who had once seen an angry crowd pull a man out of a Baghdad liquor shop and set him on fire, sat in a nearly empty car nursing a poorly hidden bourbon minibottle out of his laptop case, his hands slightly shaking and his mind edgy with the recollection of someone’s blown-up face.
The rattle of his cell phone brought a bit of relief.
“I need you here for something.” It was Sina Vafa, calling from Tehran.
“Just a minute ago I was thinking of that time in Mosul. Four years ago. Remember?”
“Three years, actually. The guy went up in the air twenty yards in front of us. When he came back down, his nose was in one place and the rest of him was, well, elsewhere.”
Sina Vafa always put on a hard-boiled front, like these things didn’t bother him. And maybe they didn’t. But they did Malek. In fact, everything bothered Malek. He was no warrior, like Sina pretended to be. Malek was a bookworm who had found himself in the wrong war at the right time. This had made something of an academic career for him afterward. In a way the war had, strangely enough, saved his life. But he’d also seen things he’d sooner forget. Like the image of that burning man outside the liquor store over there in the Dora Quarter. Or that almost perfectly intact nose in Mosul, Iraq. One minute their handsome, young Kurdish guide, so full of life, so full of enthusiasm, was walking twenty steps ahead of them talking about his wedding plans, and the next minute he had stepped on something and his face was gone, like a mask peeled right off.
How was a guy supposed to negotiate something like that with himself? He wanted to ask Sina this. But the line had gone silent and the distant connection was cut off. So Malek’s mind wandered while waiting for Sina’s redial—to Mosul, to Baghdad, to Tehran, and to, of course, his best friend, Sina. Sina’s hardening, his fast track to becoming such a dedicated, sworn enemy of the Americans, was something Malek had tried to put out of his mind. As if Sina’s soul was just another burned corpse on the side of the road where a planted bomb had gone off.
But now Sina was calling him again. What did he want? Why call him? Every day Malek would wake up and read the latest body counts of young American soldiers in the news. The war was still on and each time Malek saw the reports and read the names of the dead, he sweated the way a man with a bad conscience might. He was living here in the States, but the country wasn’t quite his. He was paying taxes and carried that prized blue American passport, and for two years now he’d had this plum teaching job in New York. It was an average college and he wasn’t even teaching in the field he’d studied toward. But there he was, strolling over to his classes two days a week and strolling the twenty minutes back to his quiet apartment in upper Harlem. He liked his neighborhood. The staccato Spanish of the Dominicans all around him. The men playing dominoes late into the evenings on the sidewalks and the old women with their beach chairs, chattering away while little kids hollered and rode their scooters up and down the block. It was enough to give you heart and start hoping again. It made you think you could right the wrongs of the world somehow, if only you exerted yourself enough, gave yourself a chance. His own immigrant dream was right here then. And i
t wasn’t even half bad that he was getting invitations to give his opinions to serious old men, retired warriors and Pentagon types, down there in Washington.
When the cell phone buzzed again, right away he asked Sina, “Why do you need me in Tehran?”
“I have legal issues.”
“Come again?”
They spoke only English with each other. It went back to a time when they’d both been students at Berkeley, in California. There had been a point—around the beginning of their third year of college—when Malek had finally realized Sina was pretty much irredeemable. Sina had bloomed into one of those full-fledged, college-boy anti-Americans and talked about going back East as if that was where his salvation lay. In the very beginning, Malek had thought it was just an act. A passing stage. Every mother’s son with a chip on his shoulder had to burn an American flag at least once in his life. Sina would grow out of it eventually, Malek reasoned. And from time to time he would try to remind Sina of the plain facts: he was Sina Vafa of the famous Vafa clan, offspring of very serious Middle Eastern money. It wasn’t oil money. But it was big money, nevertheless. So big and so much of it coming from Vafa’s business dealings with American companies that during the revolution the Islamists had put a price on Sina’s father’s head. Then father and son had had to escape Iran with only the clothes on their backs. So many late-night arguments about that ugly past. The near brawls over America and the Americans. And through it all, they’d still stuck to speaking English like it was some article of faith.
“It’s serious business,” Sina now said, his voice turning hard. “You’re the only one I trust, Rez. I need you here.”
Malek considered the possibilities. “Legal issues,” for a guy like Sina, in a place like the Islamic Republic, could really only mean one thing: Sina had finally managed to convince the courts to give some of his father’s confiscated assets back to him. The holdings were so vast—factories, chains of restaurants, land, sports teams, movie houses, and swaths of forest near the Caspian Sea shore—that even a fraction of that estate still meant an unimaginable fortune. But this brought up other questions: Why should the Islamic Republic give anything back to Sina? What had he done to convince them he deserved some of his godless, America-loving father’s estate back? And where was Malek’s place in all of this?
For a moment Malek balked, silently. It wasn’t that he’d promised himself he’d never go back. It was just that there was nothing for him to go back to over there. Except Sina. He sensed a trap. Legal issues meant getting involved. They meant putting your name and signature on things. Malek’s unease made him consider his whiskey bottle for a second. In the train car, men and women were dozing behind their laptops. Business travelers. Their lives reasonably comfortable, except for these odd-hour train rides and early flights between the coasts. Maybe they had second homes up there in Westchester or down in the Chesapeake. No doubt they had their own troubles too. But nobody was ever going to ask them to come to a place like Tehran and get involved in legal matters. What legal matters? Over there, it was their way or the jail cell. But he couldn’t say no, could he? And once he realized he couldn’t say no, a cloud lifted. His old friend wasn’t beyond changing. He would go to Tehran and bring Sina back from the cold.
Yet he knew better than to try to get any more information from Sina over a phone line between Tehran and this moving train chugging north across the state of Delaware. Feeling himself already falling in deep, and with a voice that probably betrayed it, he answered, “Summer vacation is almost here. I’ll come back, brother. Let us talk then.”
* * *
Back in New York, Malek had a few hours of sleep before the phone woke him up. It was Clara Vikingstad. Contrary to the girth of that last name, Clara was a small woman. A brunette in her late forties with intelligent brown eyes that saw the world mostly in terms of not being denied her will. Malek had spent a good portion of his adult life chasing a PhD in Middle Eastern studies. Yet of all the people he’d ever met in the business, Clara had a special way with the region. She had an ambition to match that too. She had saved Malek’s behind, literally, in Baghdad in the spring of 2004. And for that he would always owe her.
“It was good seeing you again, Rez,” she said. “I want to propose something to you.”
“Let me guess, you’re going back to Tehran and you need an interpreter.”
“Who better than you?”
He’d be glad to oblige, he told her. In Baghdad she had flexed all of her 5'1" frame and stood up to that overzealous US Army staff sergeant who had thought Malek was acting suspicious: “That’s my translator you are arresting and I won’t let you do it.” And when the man had tried to shove her out of the way and ordered a couple of his amped-up nineteen-year-olds in uniform to take hajji away, she’d bluffed that this story would be prime time news eight hours later in America. By then she was screaming—“And that, my friend, will be the end of your shining military career!” It was enough to get Malek off the hook. Enough to start him loving her for it. Yet a couple of years later, back in the States, he had quickly become just another source for her, just another interpreter, another guy Clara had worked with in some messy corner of the world for a while. Malek was a number, a face, a local guy you slept with a few times because the sound of not-so-distant mortars was amazingly conducive to casual sex.
Did all this mean he resented her? By God, no. He was the willing dust under her feet, as the Persians said. She had done him a solid once, and no, he would not forget it.
He said, “You know, Clara, I’ve been following your latest articles. But really, what’s in Guatemala for you?”
“Death squads. Kidnappings. The usual stuff. I just had to get out of the Middle East for a while, Rez. You know how that is. You did the same.” After a pause she said, “I’m sorry I couldn’t talk to you more over the weekend.”
She had been a guest at that think tank too. But she’d come with a man. An older, suavely condescending photojournalist who apparently was in the pantheon of his profession. One of those salt-and-pepper Hemingway types whose résumés say they’ve covered three dozen wars in 140 countries and they don’t mind you knowing all about it.
Still, Malek had had dinner with them Saturday night and Clara had said she’d call. And so she had.
“It’s all right,” he said, “we’ll have plenty of time to talk in Tehran. Unless His Majesty, your photographer friend, is coming there with you.”
She laughed. “He’s just a friend. And anyway, the Iranians won’t give him a visa.”
“They want you all to themselves, Clara,” he joked tiredly, “and I can’t say I blame them.”
In Washington, she’d asked what he was up to these days and he’d told her he’d settled into that teaching job in New York.
“Well, it looks like you landed on your feet in America, Rez. It beats chasing stories, always worried about your next job, doesn’t it? You’ve found your niche here. Stick to it.”
Once more he thought of how in Clara’s line of work you came upon people that you gigged with for a bit; sometimes the intimacy became exaggerated because of circumstance, like that spring in Baghdad. You worked together, you slept together, and then, once an assignment was finished, you went your separate ways. Maybe you stayed in contact for a period. But life took over and the contact became pale. It was what it was. Even affairs were on a fast clock that way.
“It’s true, it’s a safe job, Clara. I don’t know how long it will last, though.”
“Why?”
“They insist I write another book.”
She laughed again, this time like he’d said something dumb. “Rez, that’s what you’re supposed to do when you assume the title of professor. How many years did you go to school for that?”
“And if I don’t write one, and soon, they’ll shake my hand and say it was nice having you here. They needed a resident sand negro for a while,” he said, emphasizing the words for effect. “Maybe to fill their hiring quota
s. Now that they’ve filled it—”
“Stop that talk, Rez. You sound like a nag.”
“Clara,” he persisted, “I was, you know, kind of liking my life lately. It’s simple. It’s peaceful. You’ll hear a gunshot now and then in my neighborhood. But no RPGs, no IEDs. It’s a veritable Eden up here in Harlem. I don’t want to lose it. I really, really don’t.”
“You won’t. But if worse comes to worst, you can always head down to Washington and work for one of these think tanks. God knows there’s enough of them. I could even put in a good word for you. I got connections.”
She was being kind. Her kindness was real.
“You mean I could sit in some cubicle every day and churn out report after report for washed-out colonels and generals while the world burns?”
“The world is always burning, Rez. Don’t take it so personal.”
After she hung up, he spent a long time going over the two phone conversations he’d had that day. Clara Vikingstad wanted him to come to Tehran and be her translator again, and Sina wanted him to come for something. That city, Tehran, was like a lost, confused, and very dangerous kid to Malek. And it grew and grew all the time. It got fat in every direction and didn’t know its own right hand from its left. It was a place of mostly quiet desperation but also grand stupid gestures that went nowhere. After a while there, you just got tired of slugging it out every day for every little thing. And one day you woke up and realized that you had forgotten how to smile. You watched the bleakness on the long black chadors of the religious women and you felt you couldn’t breathe. Conversely, you were invited to the parties of the rich where every kind of vice was to be had for a song, and you felt like you could breathe even less. The mania of it all, the lopsidedness of a city that entertained in its contours every level of danger that could be bought, became too much after a while. You wanted to escape then. But by now Tehran had become an addiction. It held you down. Certainly it had held Malek for a time. And he was afraid of the place. Afraid because he knew it too well; knew how things could turn on you in a heartbeat. And then you were in too deep and there was no one and nowhere to turn to.
